Arise

This morning I have woken up to a bright day. There's enough light to facilitate photography. Encouraged,  I look. And I'm in catch-up mode. After a very short walk we did this morning, a day after rugby results went our way.

A dusting of ice runs along the ridgeway of the neighbours house, a line of warm white smoke emerges from their chimney, rising vertical into still cold airs. A hooded crow, maybe two, is hammering something on the flat roof above my head. Or perhaps our neighbour will see there are a couple of crows dancing.

There's finely macerated leaf material wind splattered and rain smeared on the bedroom window. Memories of the fierce storm just a couple of nights ago. Last night's excitement was a police helicopter whose searchlight passed through our garden at 2 AM. Z watched it from beside us as we slept, oblivious.

Below my third story perch, a domed green-grey acacia has budded with an explosion of spring yellow that contrasts with the open nature of the blue Douglas fir and vertical funeral green of the Italian cypress. A small garden that may be too full.

with a crunching sound

the praying mantis devours

the face of a bee

Yamaguchi Seishi

The sea beyond looks calm. The bay appears blue. Calm and blue, cold. Ferries and freighters cut across the bay. The brown trees, leafless, frame the view yet flicker with magpies, jewel like in the low winter sun. Another ephemeral shimmer in the far distance, sunlight reflecting from a glazed surface that I know to be at least 25 km away. Half way there is a friend's house I could see with the right lens.

A photograph might bring any of these things to reality better than the words I have used. The smoke will be frozen, like the ridgeway. The rattle of the magpies, the thrum of the helicopter, the mantis crunch, the hammering of the crows you'd have to imagine.

The air is always still in a photo so you'd need visual clues to imply / sense movement. The temperature of the sea becomes irrelevant unless the image includes something like dinghies crewed by the hardy in wet suits. The dirt on the double glazed window will disappear in the deep depths of image field or emerge pin sharp if it becomes the object in focus.

Such ambiguity of content is in stark contrast with the precision of technique in its portrayal.

The pleasing photograph pleases whom? And how much time will the viewer have? What does the image need to hold the viewer a fraction longer? If the Namibian Himba tribe have five words for the colour green, what do they see so differently to the rest of us?

Depictions and contradictions.